High Country Fall

CHAPTER 7

The twins had left me a note—Back between 11 and 12 and we’ll bring supper. XXX I guess they thought a greasy late-night snack would make up for the dirty coffee mugs and sticky smears I found on the dining table when I let myself into the condo and eased the strap of my laptop off my weary shoulder onto the only clean corner of the table.

As a Luddite friend keeps reminding me, a pad and pencil only weigh about six ounces; my laptop weighs seven pounds and felt like seventy that last flight of steps. Yeah, yeah, I could have left it locked in Rawlings’s office at the courthouse, but I wanted to check my e-mail, something I hadn’t had a chance to do all day and something that can’t be done with a pad and pencil.

I put the dirty mugs and sugar-encrusted spoons in the dishwasher, wiped down the table, and plugged my modem cord into the kitchen phone jack. One of these days I’m going to look into wireless communication, but for now, I keep a twenty-five-foot phone cord in my laptop case.

Along with offers of Viagra, penile implants, breast enlargement, pornographic photographs, free septic tank inspections, and the opportunity to help a general’s son fleece the Nigerian government of several million dollars, I found messages from Portland, my sole attendant if the wedding actually came off (“The way this baby’s kicking I don’t think I’m going to last till December. What about Halloween?”), from my cousin Beverly (“Forgot to tell you that there’s no garbage pickup. You’ll have to use the county’s waste site on Ridge Road.”), and a one-liner from Dwight (“You get there okay?”).

I had my finger poised over the delete button for a message entitled “Want to party?” when I noticed that the unfamiliar sender had an NC.rr.com in the server tag. It was a woman Will had brought to one of the weekly family music sessions we hold at a cousin’s barbecue house out near the farm. So many of us play the fiddle, guitar, banjo, or harmonica that even though none of us go every single week, there’re usually at least six or eight who show up after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to eat barbecue, play and sing the old songs, or, as Haywood puts it, just fellowship together.

Your brother Will says you’re up here alone this week? I know this isn’t much notice, but we’re having a party tonight and would love to have you join us. You probably don’t remember us, but Will invited us to sit in with y’all when we were down in the Raleigh area last winter. (My husband Bobby has a big walrus mustache and plays guitar and harmonica. I don’t have a mustache, but I do play the fiddle.)

Joyce Ashe

As soon as I read her description of her husband, I remembered who they were—early fifties, pleasant. They laughed at our jokes and slid right into the music with no fuss. I did notice that they were better dressed than we were, though. Nothing flashy. Their jeans and loafers were almost as worn as ours, but theirs had come with designer names and upscale brands; and their instruments were quality models, not the pawnshop finds that most of ours were. Will said they were down for one of his estate sales in Raleigh and I’d wondered at the time what his motive was in bringing them out to the country.

With Will, there’s usually a motive.

He’s three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four children, and he’s usually got a spare ace or three tucked in his sock or up his sleeve. A fast talker in both senses, Will earns a decent living as an auctioneer and appraiser, two callings that allow him to set his own hours; and although he knows how houses are put together and taken apart, which is why I let him supervise the building of my house, he’s much more interested in the market value of a house’s contents. He has Mother’s charm and Daddy’s streak of lawlessness. Everybody likes Will as long as they’re not the ones he’s messing over. It was not like him to be concerned about whether or not I had a social life while I was up here in the mountains, so he probably had an ulterior motive for strengthening the ties between the Ashes and himself.

Nevertheless, I was at loose ends this evening and I’ve always been up for a party.

“Wonderful!” said Joyce Ashe when I called the number she’d included in her e-mail. “We’re up so many twisty roads you’d never find us. Why don’t I have somebody pick you up? Say seven-thirty?”

“That’ll be fine,” I agreed and told her where I was staying.

“Casual dress and—hey! You didn’t happen to bring your guitar, did you?”

“Actually, I did.” There was a tricky chord change on a song I was learning and I’d stuck it in the trunk of my car thinking I’d get a chance to work it out. “Does this mean there’ll be playing tonight?”

She laughed. “Always. Unless you want to sing for your supper?”

Dogs don’t exactly howl when I open my mouth, but I’d as soon play Beethoven sonatas on the spoons as sing alone in front of strangers.

“Miss Deborah?” asked the man who knocked on my door an hour later. “I’m William Edward Johnson. Miss Joyce said you could use a lift out to their place?”

My driver proved to be a tubby little man pushing seventy-five like it was fifty. With his gray tie and black pants and a black vest buttoned over a long-sleeved maroon shirt, he looked like management. But his cowhide work boots and the tufts of gray hair that curled up around the edges of a grease-stained Ford Motors ball cap suggested he might be the help.

A classic BMW convertible idled in the drive. The top was down and the creamy leather seats gleamed beneath the streetlight. Cool ride, right? Did I mention that the fenders were dented, the paint was chipped, the upholstery was in tatters, and the motor roared like a Mack truck?

“This is very kind of you, Mr. Johnson,” I said and handed him my guitar case while he held the car door for me.

“Aw, call me Billy Ed,” he said, slinging my guitar into the backseat. “And I guess you’re Miss Debbie, right?”

“Wrong. Sorry. It’s either Deborah or hey you.”

Before I could get my seat belt fastened, he was peeling rubber, headed down that steep drive like a downhill skier trying to make time to the first slalom. The rear end fishtailed slightly as he braked and then made an immediate left turn to head up Main Street away from the center of town. He seemed totally oblivious to the people he’d cut off, just gunned on up the hill for about three miles, before making another left.

My hair kept whipping all around my face in the cool night air and Billy Ed glanced over. “Want me to stop and put up the top, Miss Deborah?”

“No,” I said. “I love it.”

“Good, ’cause the top’s so tore, wouldn’t do us much good anyhow.” He reached under the seat and handed me a slightly cleaner ball cap.

With one hand on the steering wheel, the other fumbled to extract a cigarette from a crumpled pack.

I held my breath as he touched the glowing lighter to the tip of his cigarette, then returned the lighter to its hole, all the while negotiating a road that twisted worse than a black snake climbing a light pole. Every time we met a car from the opposite direction, I was uncomfortably aware that the road had no guardrails and that the narrow shoulders seemed to drop off into a dark abyss, despite the moon that was trying to break through some thin clouds.

“Dim your Gee-dee lights!” Billy Ed shouted when he brushed by a large vehicle with its headlights on high.

The other car was barely moving and its brake lights lit up the night.

“Turons!” he said derisively as he shifted gears. “Know how you can tell tourists from the natives?”

“No.”

“By the smell of their burnt-out brakes. Ought not to be allowed out at night, scared as they are.”

I was glad he couldn’t see my white knuckles.

“So how you know Miss Joyce and Bobby?” he asked above the roar of the motor.

“My brother introduced them to me, but I don’t really know them,” I said, leaning toward him to counterbalance the centrifugal force that wanted to sling me out of the car as he cornered sharply. “What about you?”

“I took on their old house up on the other side of the ridge about four or five years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, their kids were grown and they wanted something smaller, closer to their work.”

“What sort of work do they do?”

“Real estate. Property management. They have exclusive rights to Pritchard Cove.”

“Pritchard Cove? Isn’t that where Dr. Ledwig lived?”

“Ledwig?” He snorted. “Nope. I did hear tell he wanted to dynamite it off the face of the mountain, though.”

“Why?” Not that I cared, but anything to distract me from this headlong hurtle into hell. “What is Pritchard Cove anyhow?”

“Well, some folks would say it’s the best-planned community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Others like Ledwig’ll tell you it’s a desecration of unspoiled land. Pritchard Cove was a mote in his eye. And not a teeny-tiny little mote either—it was a Gee-dee two-by-four beam. Wrecked his view.”

I thought back to the pictures I’d seen in court today. Admittedly, the focus was on the deck and on the victim’s body, not the view from that deck, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything except a long vista of colorful treetops and I said as much.

“Well-planned,” Billy Ed said again. “The houses were designed to blend into the shape of the land. Most of the trees weren’t touched, and even when the leaves drop off it’s hard to see ’em ’cause their covenant prohibits big grassy lawns. ’Course now, the houses are there and if you look hard enough—”

“I take it Dr. Ledwig looked?”

“With a magnifying glass.”

By now we had made so many turns, there was no way I could have found my way back to Cedar Gap. All the turns ran together, except that each was onto a narrower road, until we finally pulled into a long graveled driveway that ran up a steep grade between trees that met overhead. We circled a thicket of hemlocks, then the ground abruptly leveled and the drive broadened into a huge circle of gravel in front of a long low house built of rough gray stones. From Jeeps and pickups to a couple of Land Rovers and one bright yellow Hummer, at least forty vehicles were parked beneath the trees.

The gravel drive turned to flagstones that led directly to a massive wooden door that stood ajar so that anyone could walk in. We passed through a large reception room, where the entire opposite wall was nothing but glass that looked out into the dark night. To one side was a three-foot-tall pottery jar filled with long branches of bright orange bittersweet berries. Overstuffed couches and chairs were clumped in conversational groupings before a stone wall with a fireplace spacious enough to roast an ox. A log fire snapped and crackled on the hearth. Above it hung a big oil painting that looked like it could be a Bob Timberlake original. It pictured an old-fashioned kitchen table during jam-making—gleaming jars of jellied fruit capped with squares of colorful calico, a copper kettle and ladle, and an earthenware bowl of luscious blackberries awaiting their turn in the kettle.

An oversize quilting frame and several chairs stood in front of the windows and a brilliant king-size patchwork quilt was a work in progress. Beautiful hand-thrown mountain pottery glowed beneath individual baby spotlights in the ceiling.

More patchwork quilts were draped over the backs of the couches, and I had an impression of space and rustic luxury. If this was the “smaller place” the Ashes had bought when they downsized, how big was their previous house that Billy Ed “took on”?

There was no time to speculate, though. This level was empty, and Billy Ed was already disappearing with my guitar case down a flight of iron and stone steps at the end of the room, so I hurried after him.

Like the courthouse back in town, the Ashes’ house was built down the side of a mountain. I saw another large room almost identical to the one above, complete with stone fireplace and a cheerful fire, except that here the wall of glass was punctuated with French doors that opened onto a wide stone terrace, and the painting over the fireplace was a romantic mountain vista. Unlike the first, this level buzzed with laughter, talk, the clink of silverware against plates, and the tinkle of ice in a variety of glasses. I smelled hot yeast rolls and the aroma of something savory that probably came from the copper chafing dishes on the loaded buffet table in the middle of the room. A bar backed onto the staircase and seemed to be better stocked than some I’d seen in restaurants. Two white-jacketed Latinos were busily filling drink orders.

As I paused near the bottom of the steps, my hostess detached herself from a group and came over with outstretched hands and a welcoming smile. “So pleased you could come, Judge Knott! Love your hat!”

“Call me Deborah,” I said, belatedly remembering that I was still wearing the grimy cap Billy Ed had handed me in the car. I pulled it off, laughed at the raunchy logo, which I hadn’t noticed before, and stuffed it into my shoulder bag. At least my jeans, white broadcloth shirt, and red wool cardigan were in sync with what everyone else here was wearing. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Not at all. Let’s get you a drink and then come meet some of your colleagues.”

Joyce Ashe was as I’d remembered her: an easygoing, big-boned woman carrying about twenty-five extra pounds and comfortable with it. She had one of the bartenders build me a Bloody Mary (I hadn’t eaten anything since my chicken salad at noon and Bloody Marys always feel like food), refreshed her own bourbon and branch, then led me over to a group warming themselves by the fireplace.

“I hear you already know Lucius Burke,” she said as the circle opened to admit us.

“Yes,” I said, taking the hand the district attorney offered and trying not to fall into those incredible green eyes. The names of the two attorneys and someone who owned a ski lodge just on the other side of the Tennessee border went in one ear and out the other. To cover my lapse, I moved closer to the hearth to examine the picture. According to the little brass plate attached to the simple wood frame, it had been painted in 1903 by an artist named Genevieve Carlton. I read the title out loud: “In Nature’s Realm.”

Joyce Ashe laughed. “Well, that’s what the artist called it. Bobby and I call it The Mountains of Florida.”

I looked at the painting with renewed interest. “I didn’t know Florida had any mountains,” I said, stepping right into it.

“Oh, Lord, yes! Florida’s got beautiful mountains.” She paused two beats. “They just happen to lie in North Carolina.”

I still didn’t get it.

“Floridians think they own our mountains,” the fortyish attorney—Liz Peters?—explained with a kindly smile.

“Think?” said a jovial silver-haired man who’d come up behind me. He was accompanied by a tall, heavyset man who sported a thick bushy mustache—Bobby Ashe. “There’s no think about it, Liz darlin’. Joyce and Bobby and me, we’ve personally sold about half of Lafayette County to ’em, so damn straight they own our mountains, right, Bobby?”

Bobby Ashe hoisted his glass to the man and grinned broadly. “I never argue with a partner.”

“Partner?” asked Ms. Peters, raising her eyebrows in surprise.

“Yep,” said Bobby Ashe. He put one arm around Joyce, the other around the man. “It took us two months to hammer out the details, but we signed the last of the papers last week. You’re looking at all three partners of the newly formed Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty.”

“Wow!” said the young male attorney whose name hadn’t registered on me.

“Wow is right,” said Liz Peters, looking impressed.

“Congratulations,” said Lucius Burke. He turned to me with a smile. “I may have to get you to refresh my memory on the statutes governing monopolies, though. Between ’em, they probably account for seventy percent of the property sales in this county.”

“More like eighty,” said the silver-haired man, giving me a puzzled look. “Have we met? You a new attorney here?”

“This is Judge Knott,” said Bobby Ashe, flashing me a welcome smile. “She’s sitting in for Tim Rawlings while he’s down east on a fishing trip.”

“Norman Osborne,” said the man. “Nice to meet you, Judge.”

“My pleasure. And please. Tonight, I’m just Deborah.”

“Lucius tells us you found the kid that killed Carlyle Ledwig guilty today,” said Joyce.

“Not guilty,” Burke and I said together. I smiled at him and explained to the rest that all I’d done was find probable cause to bind that young man over for trial in superior court.

“Same thing, isn’t it?” asked Norman Osborne.

“I hope so,” said Burke.

I shook my head. “Not necessarily. He’s still innocent until declared guilty by a jury of his peers.”

“Gonna be hard to find one of those up here,” Liz Peters said tartly.